Introduction

In the summer of 1968, a remarkable book written by the young architecture student Giovanni Fanelli was published by Marchi e Bertolli, a Florentine publishing house founded in 1965 by Ferruccio Marchi.¹ Titled Architettura moderna in Olanda 1900–1940 [Modern architecture in the Netherlands 1900–1940], its nine chapters narrated the history of Dutch modern architecture, moving from Pierre Cuypers, Karel de Bazel, and H. P. Berlage to the Amsterdam School and De Stijl (Figure 1). The text was lavishly illustrated with more than a hundred architectural drawings; a separate section featured a series of photos, many of which were taken by the author himself, and it concluded with an extensive documentary part, containing a chronological annotated bibliography and biographies of 72 architects. At the time of its publication, Architettura moderna in Olanda seemed like a valuable source for Italian architecture enthusiasts. However, what makes the history of this book striking is that the book was primarily read by a Dutch audience, even if many would not have been proficient in the Italian language. The success of the book in the Netherlands led to its translation into Dutch a decade later (Fanelli 1978), and, subsequently, Architettura moderna in Olanda became a standard reference work for one or multiple generations of Dutch students in architectural history (Figure 2).

Figure 1: Giovanni Fanelli, Architettura moderna in Olanda 1900–1940, 1968, cover.

Figure 2: Giovanni Fanelli, Moderne architectuur in Nederland 1900–1940 [Modern architecture in the Netherlands 1900–1940], 1978, cover.

The publication of the book was in keeping with a trend in which Italian scholars from the 1950s were gradually paying more attention to Dutch 20th-century architectural history and more generally emerging as the interpreters of modern architecture. Essays on individual architects were followed by more encompassing surveys (Veronesi 1953; Zevi 1953; Argan 1955). However, while other texts were mostly read in Italy, Architettura moderna in Olanda became an international phenomenon and facilitated a new kind of dialogue between the two countries. In this article, I analyze the Dutch reception of Fanelli’s book. My point of departure is how this historian managed to become so influential in the Netherlands within a relatively short time span, even with a limited grasp of the Dutch language and the wider context of Dutch history and culture. What does this say about Dutch architectonic culture and scholarship of the time?

My analysis rests on two assumptions. Firstly, as I show, Fanelli’s Architettura moderna in Olanda 1900–1940 was a precursor of a group of historians that initiated, in the 1970s and 1980s, a dialogue between Italy and the Netherlands. Secondly, these actions unfolded during a crucial phase in the historiography of Dutch modern architecture. From the 1960s onward, the architecture from between 1880 and 1940 was in the process of being historicized.² This history was now no longer written by supporters of a particular movement; instead, its study was connected to the emancipation of architecture history as a branch of art history or as a substantial subject in schools of architecture and, as such, as a science in its own right. An engaged attitude by the side of the historian was now exchanged for a more detached position in which the recent past became the focus of an exclusive epistemic concern. As such, this essay aligns itself with recent studies in architectural historiography (Vidler 2005; Costanza and Leach 2022; Capponi 2020; Hartoonian 2025; Heynen 2024; Scrivano 2021). In the Netherlands, this process did not occur without controversy. In this article, I will reconstruct the steps of Fanelli’s success in the Netherlands, from the making of the book in post-war Italy to its first reception in the Netherlands and the debate that followed the Dutch translation of the book. In fact, the question that runs like a leitmotif through the Italian-Dutch dialogue depicted here is how to write Dutch modern architecture history from a detached, ‘scientific’ point of view. It was Fanelli’s intention to correct a partial and incomplete picture painted by the international historiography of modern architecture. From this point of view, it seemed like the ‘scientific’ writing of history would involve an investigation of an unchanging, self-perpetuating corpus of objects. However, what became clear from the debate following the publication of the book was that ‘doing history’, also in a scientific context, was more than a passive recording of the past. Architectural history did not function as a crowbar to pry open ‘what really happened’ but was a proposal to see the past through a certain lens. This interpretative framework was never beyond contestation; instead, it served as the point of departure for critical discussions and alternative perspectives. It was within these debates that the object of Dutch modern architecture first took shape — not through consensus, but through contention.

Florence

At the start of the 1960s, Giovanni Fanelli was a student in architecture at the Università di Firenze (University of Florence), with a particular interest in the history of art and architecture, which was stimulated by professors such as the art historian Giuseppe Marchini, the architect Ludovico Quaroni, and the architectural historian Piero Sanpaolesi (Fanelli, November 2023). At that time, knowledge of the history of modern architecture was still very limited, despite Italian students having access to books by Bruno Zevi, Leonardo Benevolo, and Giulio Carlo Argan, among others (De Michelis 2024: 16). Fanelli’s desire to become familiarized with the history of modern architecture may have been nourished by the exhibitions organized about Le Corbusier (1963) and Alvar Aalto (1965) in Palazzo Strozzi (Corsani and Bini 2007: xx).

For this essay, much of the behind-the-scenes reconstruction of the book and its background was made possible through an interview with Fanelli, who has otherwise written little about his reasons for exploring the Netherlands (Fanelli 1968: 9). Fanelli made his first trip to the Netherlands in 1961 just before graduation.³ He said he was attracted to this small country, which seemed to him like a culturally rich yet physically compact area, where various tendencies of 20th-century architectural culture had progressed in a remarkable way.⁴ During his journey, Fanelli discovered a rich culture of specialized periodicals, such as the Bouwkundig Weekblad [Construction weekly] and De Opmerker [The observer], which he listed in his bibliography. He translated a few articles from these journals, which becomes clear from his notes, for example, when writing about the Beurs van Berlage (Berlage’s stock exchange) (1968: 57). When he realized that a comprehensive history of Dutch modern architecture was missing, he then decided to write this history himself (Fanelli, November 2023). This entailed learning the Dutch language and engaging with the laborious work of translation to Italian (November 2023). In 1964, Fanelli made a second trip to the Netherlands. This time, he photographed buildings on an extensive scale and collected historiographical sources: journals and books. As he recalled during the interview, his aim was to grasp the diversity of architectural culture in the Netherlands during the first decades of the 20th century and to analyze its characterizing elements. His method was based on direct observation of the buildings and the compilation of extensive historiographical documentation (November 2023). It was important for him to write the history from a critical ambition, which for Fanelli meant carefully analyzing sources and assessing evidence, including data verification, rather than accepting the existing histories at face value. To this end, Fanelli conducted research at the libraries of the Technische Hogeschool Delft (Technical College of Delft) and at Yale University (November 2023).⁵

Toward the end of the work, he decided to use interviews as source as well. Fanelli wrote letters to Jan Wils, Gerrit Rietveld, and Hendrik Wijdeveld, and he met with Wijdeveld in person (Het Nieuwe Instituut, Archief Wijdeveld H. Th.). Fanelli’s inclusion of Marinus Jan Granpré Molière among his interviewees — framed as an attempt to represent a diversity of voices, beyond the so-called modern movement — is, to my mind, particularly telling, as it signals a critical distance from modernist orthodoxy and a deliberate broadening of the historiographical lens (Fanelli, November 2023). However, in view of his ambition to write a critical history, Fanelli showed a somewhat puzzling confidence in the capacity of these architects to reflect on not only their own professional past but also the historiographical hypotheses of the book. For example, he asked Granpré Molière and Wijdeveld if they agreed that the Amsterdam School was derived from Willem Kromhout rather than from Berlage (Figure 3) (Het Nieuwe Instituut, Archief Granpré Molière, Marinus Jan).⁶ This strategy sometimes led to confusing situations. For example, Fanelli corresponded with the architect Jan Wils, who was, in the 1960s, a little-researched figure in the history of Dutch architecture and was mostly associated with the journal De Stijl. Wils had collaborated with Van Doesburg and wrote articles, among others about Frank Lloyd Wright, for the journal (Wils 1918a, b, c; Van Bergeijk 2007: 9, 246). Fanelli remembers that, to his surprise, Wils stated to have never known or admired Wright (Fanelli, November 2023). In his book, Fanelli was the first post-war historian to dedicate an entire section to Wils; despite what Wils claimed in the interview, Wright’s influence remained obvious for him (Van Bergeijk 2007: 247; Fanelli 1968: 113–15). After completing the manuscript of Architettura moderna in Olanda, Fanelli showed his work to the art historian Carl Ludovico Ragghianti. It was Ragghianti who proposed it to the editor Ferruccio Marchi.

Figure 3: Letter from Giovanni Fanelli to Wijdeveld, 1967. © Giovanni Fanelli. Source: Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.

Italian ‘Esterofilia’

With his book, Fanelli was not treading virgin soil. In fact, the Italian interest in Dutch modern architecture goes back to the early 1920s, when authors such as Gaetano Minnucci (1924; 1926) and Giuseppe Astorri (1924) started to write about Dutch architecture for Italian architecture journals. After the Second World War, Italian publications about Dutch modern architecture increased (Astengo 1949; Zevi 1952).⁷ The Italian architect Pier Luigi Nicolin (1994) has attributed what he termed ‘esterofilia’, or the pronounced interest in foreign architectural history, to a broader sense of disillusionment with Italy’s own engagement in the modern movement during the 1930s and ’40s (33). After the fall of the fascist regime, the ‘masters’ could only be found outside of Italy, so claimed Nicolin, resulting in the fact that major Italian architects had their foreign counterpart to dialogue with: Ludovico Quaroni with Gunnar Asplund, Ernesto Nathan Rogers with Walter Gropius and Auguste Perret, Vittorio Gregotti with Peter Behrens and Aldo Rossi with Adolf Loos and Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1994: 33). According to Nicolin, Italy became a laboratory of historical research in the decades after the war, fueled by the desire to capture an experience that was believed to be missing due to the entanglements of Italian architects with fascism.

While this broader cultural context shaped Fanelli’s intellectual formation, a specific point of departure consisted in the surveys of modern architectural history written by Zevi and Benevolo. In 1950, Zevi published his Storia dell’architettura moderna [History of modern architecture], in which he drew on the earlier scholarship of Walter Curt Behrendt and Henry Russell Hitchcock to analyze Dutch architectural movements. For Zevi (1950), Berlage was a pioneer and part of the long ascent of modern architecture in the 19th century, but he did not yet establish a clear movement (90). Those movements did appear the following period: Zevi pointed to J. J. P. Oud as one of the ‘masters’, alongside Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe, who brought the modern movement to cohesion and clarity (Zevi 1950: 148; Tournikiotis 1999: 67–68). While Zevi (1950) advocated for modern architecture, he rejected what he regarded as purely aesthetic movements. The Amsterdam School therefore only appeared in the margins of his history (328). In 1960, Benevolo published his Storia dell’architettura moderna as part of the attempt to revitalize the modern movement and use it as a backdrop for the architectural debates of the time (Tournikiotis 1999: 85). In confirming the cohesion and unity of the modern movement, he pointed to a possible correspondence of the Amsterdam School and De Stijl. According to Benevolo, Dutch architecture of the period was not marked by rigid ideological oppositions. Key architects like Oud and Willem Dudok were only loosely affiliated with De Stijl and the Amsterdam School, so they should be regarded as ‘fellow travelers’ rather than as opponents (Benevolo 1964: 90). It can be argued that Fanelli continued the discussion from where Benevolo had started, as the complementary nature of Dutch architectonic movements was also important for him. However, the differences between the two historians were large. In contrast to Benevolo — and also Zevi for that matter — Fanelli was an apolitical historian who did not share Benevolo’s engagement with the modern movement. Fanelli’s motivation was epistemological in nature: his aim was to formulate reliable knowledge about Dutch modern architecture in the period between 1900 and 1940, as Fanelli expressed in the subtitle of the book.

As becomes clear from his book, Fanelli was influenced specifically by two articles. One was ‘L’epopea borghese della Scuola di Amsterdam’ [The bourgeois epic of the Amsterdam School], published in Casabella Continuità in 1957 by Guido Canella, who sought to reassess the Amsterdam School following earlier critiques by Zevi (Università degli Studi Firenze, Biblioteca di Architettura). Arguing for a more nuanced historical understanding, Canella emphasized the importance of the political context in which the movement emerged: the enlightened politics of the liberals and Catholics in the 19th century and their policy to reach out to the working class in an attempt to find support for their ideas. According to Canella (1957), it was in this way, supported by liberal administrators, that Berlage, as an anti-bourgeois and socialist thinker, was able to realize his ‘popular’ architecture — by the people for the people (77–78). Instead, he claimed, architects pertaining to the Amsterdam School did not partake in this progressive movement, as their ‘decorations’ were simply bourgeois (1957: 76–85). The other article was Giorgio Grassi’s 1961‘Immagine di Berlage’ [Images of Berlage] also published in Casabella Continuità, which presented a contrasting interpretation of Berlage to that of Canella. Grassi rejected the notion of Berlage as a visionary precursor and emphasized the convergence of early 20th-century socialism with widespread religious debate in the Netherlands as a key context for Berlage’s work. He interpreted Berlage’s architecture as shaped by a tension between a rational approach of theology and a mystical sensibility (Grassi 1961: 39–40). Fanelli appreciated how both authors highlighted the significance of the fin de siècle climate in the Netherlands, which, according to Fanelli (1968), had been overlooked by Zevi and Benevolo (140).

The Structure and Argument of Architettura moderna in Olanda

From the outset, Fanelli (1968) made his revisionist aims explicit: in the opening lines of his book, he argued that although the historiography of modern architecture had acknowledged the significance of the Dutch contribution, it had done so in an ‘imbalanced, forced and unilateral’ way (13). This suggests that Fanelli traveled to the Netherlands with a precise historiographical agenda. He was by no means unique among his generation in traveling to European countries to study modern architecture. Notably, his work bears a compelling parallel to Stefano Ray’s books on Swedish architecture from the same period. While both authors explored relatively uncharted territory, Ray’s writing lacks the same emphasis on systematic research and appears to reflect a more unquestioning acceptance of the modern movement (Ray 1969; Gaetani and Nannini 2019). What distinguished Fanelli from his contemporaries was his engagement with earlier architectural histories and his motivation to rewrite the history of Dutch modern architecture from scratch. Fanelli wanted to write a research-based history and thus started using archival sources. For example, Fanelli recounts being fascinated by the Tolhuisbrug (Toll house bridge) in Utrecht. On the site, he discovered that the work was attributed to municipal public works, but there was no more information.

Through research in the topographical archive in Utrecht, he discovered that the bridge was a work by the architect Johannes Izak Planjer and that he was responsible for many other public works in Utrecht (Fanelli 1979: 5) (Figure 4). It is on this basis that Fanelli wanted to capture the essence of Dutch architecture during the first decades of the 20th century. According to him, what most typified the Netherlands in this period was that many architects were active as writers (Fanelli 1968: 14). He related this to what he believed to be the main challenge of Dutch architects, which was to redefine the relationship between artists and society (1968: 23). Architects now saw their practice as a cultural and social activity that needed the support of a public (1968: 26). He also pointed to the rise of fin de siècle ideologies as diverse as anarchism, socialism, and theosophy as attempts to restore this relationship, which had been in a crisis since the French Revolution (1968: 23). In other words, despite their differences, Fanelli regarded these ideologies as unified by facing the same challenge and by responding to the same questions. For Fanelli, they inspired a wide range of architects: the mystical doctrines of theosophy were an inspiration for architects like De Bazel and J. L. M. Lauweriks, but equally for members of De Stijl, and the industrialist C. H. van der Leeuw, who was involved in the construction of the Van Nelle factory in the late 1920s. It is in this way that Fanelli (1968) postulated a unity in multiplicity that underpinned Dutch architecture at the start of the 20th century (23). This idea returns in what may be considered as the most speculative part of the book, where he identified a ‘tradizione olandese’ [Dutch tradition]. The unity of culture, so he argued, not only stemmed from facing the same challenges but was also made possible by a long historical tradition originating in the Middle Ages (1968: 18–19). Fanelli (1968) came to this conclusion based on his study of Berlage, who sometimes pointed to the Middle Ages as an example of, as Fanelli puts it, ‘quel parametro spirituale comune alla collettività che è alla radice della possibilità dell’esistenza stessa di una architettura come cultura’ [a spiritual parameter that was the same for the whole community and that made the existence of architecture as a culture possible] (18).

Figure 4: Tolhuisbrug Utrecht, 1925. Photographer: Giovanni Fanelli. (Fanelli 1968: 243).

For many Dutch readers, Fanelli’s emphasis on the Middle Ages may have appeared somewhat alienating, as historical narratives of national identity in the Netherlands typically foreground later periods. Historians commonly reference events such as the establishment of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company) in 1602, the foundation of the modern kingdom in 1815, or the late industrialization in the 19th century as formative moments in the construction of Dutch national identity (Kennedy 2017: 9–11; Reinink 1969: 5). For Fanelli (1968), together with a strong bourgeois culture — he referred to the pivotal role of the Dutch middle class in shaping the economic, artistic, and political landscape of the 19th and 20th centuries — it was the communal backdrop created in the Middle Ages that first made architectural innovation possible (19). The postulation of a unity of culture in which different artistic expressions despite their differences were subsumed by one cultural stratum is the main hypothesis of Fanelli’s book. Consequently, he claimed that the history of Dutch modern architecture should no longer be written as a sequence of opposing groups: instead, Fanelli wanted to write a relational history in which the major Dutch avant-garde movements were correlated. This signified a break with the prevailing interpretation of the history of Dutch modern architecture as a rivalry between two avant-garde movements. An example of this interpretation can be found in Die Baukunst der Neuesten Zeit [Architecture of the most recent period] by Gustav Adolf Platz (1927), who framed Dutch modernism as a dialogue between De Stijl and the Amsterdam School, both of which regarded Berlage as a foundational figure (67). Fanelli’s thesis opened the door to a synthetic history as the form par excellence in which the interaction of the architectural movements of the past could be addressed (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Spread from Moderne architectuur in Nederland [Modern architecture in the Netherlands]. Photographer: Giovanni Fanelli. (Fanelli 1978: 15).

Writing the History of Dutch Modern Architecture

Central to Fanelli’s interpretation of the history of Dutch modern architecture is the fin de siècle, which he identified as the period when a defining dualism first appeared — one that would shape the very character of Dutch modern architecture. Fanelli argued that the Dutch Art Nouveau should be understood not merely as a reaction against the neo-styles but also — more enigmatically — as an instance of what he defined as ‘poésie pure’ and, as such, as an expression of the essence of art. For Fanelli, this search for essence was not a purely emotional or romantic pursuit; rather, it was a ‘rational’ endeavor grounded in the need for structural clarity. He saw this rational endeavor not as antithetical to artistic expression, but as its most authentic vehicle — a means of what he described as a ‘moment of profound truth of modern culture’ (Fanelli 1968: 25). In this context, rationalism served as a tool to uncover fundamental aesthetic and cultural principles; thus, Fanelli positioned Art Nouveau as an inquiry into the nature of modernity itself. However, the author stated that buildings such as Willem Kromhout’s American Hotel equally pertained to the Art Nouveau and should be regarded as a purely decorative endeavor, based on fantasy and emotion (1968: 83).

For Fanelli (1968) it was typical of Dutch architectonic culture around this time that both tendencies — the rational geometric and the emotional-fantastic — could co-exist, something that could be attributed to the ‘positività della politica della borghesia progressista olandese’ [positive politics of the progressive Dutch bourgeoisie] (26). In this way, Fanelli’s analysis was primarily driven by his central hypothesis concerning the correlation of tendencies. For Fanelli, Berlage epitomized the dual nature of Dutch modern architecture. In the design for the Stock Exchange, for example, he claimed that it was Berlage’s rationalism that allowed the building to be integrated in the surrounding urban fabric, while its tower stemmed from a romantic aspiration to envision the future (1968: 60). Fanelli’s attempt to take a distance from ‘operative’ historiography — meaning a historiography that actively supported the goals of the modern movement, such as written by Zevi and Benevolo — becomes evident in his chapter about ‘La crisi del Movimento Moderno in Olanda’ [The crisis of the modern movement in Holland]. In it, he discussed what in the Netherlands was known as the main counterpart of architectural modernism — namely, the architects pertaining to the Delft School. Fanelli attributed the rise of this reactionary movement to economic crisis and widespread pessimism, leading architects to seek stability in historical styles (1968: 108) (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Spread from Moderne architectuur in Nederland. Photographer: Giovanni Fanelli. (Fanelli 1978: 17).

Leiden, 1968: Reception in the Netherlands

With the publication of Architettura moderna in Olanda, it seemed like Fanelli had written a useful book for an Italian audience. However, unexpectedly, the book became influential in the Netherlands and not in Italy. The protagonist who played a crucial role in the introduction of Fanelli in the Netherlands was the art historian Wessel Reinink. In 1968, Reinink (1965) was a 35-year-old historian who had just finished his dissertation about the architect De Bazel (Figure 7). Inspired by the first attempts by Dutch art historians to write 20th-century history (Gans 1966; Jaffé 1956), he had decided for a dissertation topic dating to the fin de siècle period. There was a consensus among art historians that this period was now sufficiently remote in time to be a theme for scientific study (Hoekstra 2023: 26). He also opted for architectural history, which was an uncommon specialization for art historians at the time.⁸ In 1965, Reinink began his academic career in art history at the Universiteit Leiden (Leiden University). There are no sources about when he first encountered Fanelli’s book, but in all likelihood it was in September 1968 while staying at the Netherlands Interuniversity Institute for Art History in Florence, when the book had just been published (Reinink 2011: 246).

Figure 7: A. W. Reinink, K. P. C. De Bazel-Architect, 1965, cover page.

In 1969, Reinink accepted a position as a professor in architectural history at the art historical institute of the Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht (Utrecht University), where he became the successor of Murk Daniël Ozinga, who was the first art history professor in the Netherlands to focus exclusively on architectural history (Reinink 2011: 258; Hoekstra 2023: 26). Around this time, Reinink already had contact with Fanelli; he assisted him by seeking financial support for his travels to the Netherlands and he was also involved in the first attempts to translate the book.⁹ Reinink was clearly impressed by Fanelli’s book, as can be seen in the book review he published in 1969 in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, the only book review published on the Italian version of the book (Figure 8) (Stadsarchief [Archive of the City] Rotterdam, archive NRC Handelsblad). In this review, Reinink (1969) showed admiration for what he regarded as the remarkable gesture of a foreigner who, with a broad panorama, brought attention to the Dutch architecture of the period (5). Reinink (1965) highlighted the contrast between the international recognition of the Dutch contribution to modern architecture and the limited attention it received from scholars from the Netherlands (5). He noted the absence of a comprehensive survey on the subject — even in Dutch — and attributed this to the nascent stage of modern architectural history in the Netherlands, where scholars were still grappling with unresolved issues and the large volume of material. Within this context, Reinink (1969) regarded Fanelli as an open-minded outsider whose work constituted a liberating act (5). As an art historian, Reinink was even less engaged with efforts to revive the modern movement or with contemporary architecture practice than Fanelli. His approach to architecture history was primarily driven by a pursuit to gain reliable and verifiable knowledge of the past. Therefore, he greatly appreciated the reference apparatus where Fanelli had brought together source material published between 1850 and 1968, which Reinink thought was much needed and had never been done before. Thinking of the Dutch users of the book, he added that this part was accessible to those who had not mastered the Italian language (Reinink 1969: 5). Reinink criticized Fanelli’s postulation of ‘medieval tradition’ as the ‘only grand tradition’ in the Netherlands. However, most of all he valued Fanelli as an open-minded outsider ‘who for once pulled things together in an orderly fashion’ (1969: 5).

Figure 8: A. W. Reinink, review of Architettura moderna in Olanda, NRC Handelsblad, 1969.

The Task of Translation: Reframing for a Dutch Readership

Reinink’s endorsement contributed significantly to the book’s success: it sold out rapidly in the Netherlands. Most readers did not know the Italian language but used the book for its references. In 1970, the Amsterdam bookstore Scheltema and Holkema commissioned a translation into Dutch.¹⁰ The Dutch fate of the book was closely intertwined with the history of the Nederlands Documentatiecentrum voor de Bouwkunst [NDBK; Dutch Documentation Center for Architecture]. Founded in 1967 by the Dutch government, this center was the first place in the Netherlands where architectural archives were systematically collected and studied, thus providing a crucial impulse for the study of 20th-century Dutch architecture (Figueiredo 2010: 98). During the 1970s, the NDBK developed into a platform for international exchange; many foreign researchers came to the center, including a considerable group of Italian scholars (Taverne 2017).¹¹ To inform a broader public and stimulate debate, the center organized exhibitions and published a book series (Figueiredo 2010: 100). The first volume of these Cahiers van het Nederlands Documentatiecentrum voor de Bouwkunst [Notebooks of the Dutch Documentation Center for Architecture] was written by Reinink and published in 1975; Reinink proposed dedicating the second volume of the series to Architettura moderna in Olanda translated into Dutch.¹² After Fanelli and the publisher Ferruccio Marchi had agreed, a first step in this direction was taken by asking Umberto Barbieri, a young Italian architect working as an intern at the NDBK, to correct the translation commissioned by Scheltema and Lolkema, which was at that point an unpublished manuscript.¹³

During the first months of 1976, the art historian Wim de Wit, who worked for the NDBK, was appointed as the supervisor of the project.¹⁴ De Wit faced the challenge of translating the book so that it could be understood by a Dutch audience without altering the original content. His premise was that the original text had to be left intact and that it should not be ‘Dutchified’, which led him to use less common terms and to leave some words untranslated, such as the expression ‘epopea borghese’ [citizen epic] at the start of the book (Fanelli 1978: 9).¹⁵ Among others, De Wit checked and completed the oeuvre lists of architects. Based on the research done in the NDBK, De Wit added a substantial number of architects, including Bernardus Joannes Koldewey, Frits Eschauzier, and Johan Niegeman.¹⁶ With this work, it seemed like De Wit was employing this operation as a means to finally establish the scientific inventory of architects that had been absent from Dutch scholarship. De Wit proposed a major revision to the final chapter, ‘La crisi del movimento moderno in Olanda’ [The crisis of the modern movement in Holland], of the Italian book, suggesting the removal of the term ‘modern movement’ from the title and the reconfiguration of a section into a standalone chapter focused on the reaction of the Delft School to functionalist architecture. This change, accepted by Fanelli, distanced the book further from ‘operative history’, reflecting the divergence between the priorities of art historians and the concerns of architects (Fanelli 1968: 8; Fanelli 1978: 6). The book Moderne architectuur in Nederland 1900–1940 [Modern architecture in the Netherlands 1900–1940] was published in 1978, with an edition of five thousand copies. It sold very well to the point that in 1979 it was almost out of print.¹⁷ The Staatsuitgeverij [Government Publishing Office] therefore decided to make a second edition, which was printed in 1981.

Histories in Tension: Between Synthesis and Fragment

Following the publication of Moderne architectuur in Nederland, reviews appeared in several Dutch newspapers (Roding 1979; Pruys 1979; Solinger 1981). However, the most substantial discussion of the book occurred in the professional journals Plan and Wonen TA/BK. In 1979, Francis Strauven described the book as a ‘modest and limited synthesis’. According to Strauven, the book was a ‘classic stylistic overview of movements and figures’ in which architecture was treated purely formally, without addressing its theoretical or ideological implications. Nevertheless, he concluded the book was an excellently documented work of reference (Strauven 1979: 29). Strauven’s critical review led to a response by Fanelli, which was published in a following issue of the journal. In an article titled ‘Reality Is More Than an Image of It’, Fanelli (1979) pointed out that in his 1968 book he had never used the notion of style (4). He continued by describing what, according to him, should be the task of the historian. He wrote that he was against a historical practice pretending to give meaning to the past and that, for him, ‘doing history’ was a process of verification, of reconstruction, and of an evaluation of data and, as such, a form of science. Fanelli (1979) claimed that the historical practice is contrary to any ideological position; it is not the search for an ‘image of reality’ but the search for truth, understood as a deepening of knowledge (6).

Thus, Fanelli positioned himself as a rigorous historian who privileged epistemic objectives over the political, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of historical practice: a stance that underscores his departure from the historiographic approaches of Zevi and Benevolo, while shedding light on his intellectual affinity with Dutch art historians. The most radical criticism was published in the professional journal Plan and written by Umberto Barbieri, who had been involved in the translation of the book, and Cees Boekraad, both architecture students from Delft. Their main point of criticism was the supposed idealism that pervaded Fanelli’s book, resulting in an all too positive view of Dutch architecture. Barbieri and Boekraad were jeunes turcs who tried to assert a historiographical approach that was opposed to that of Fanelli — or so they claimed. Their aim was to challenge an emerging consensus about the nature of Dutch modern architectural history. They wrote: ‘[The] hallmark [of the book] is the creation of a lovely, neo-romantic landscape, a balanced conflict-free society, in which the author discovers an immutable ethical and aesthetical quality of architecture’ (Barbieri and Boekraad 1982: 207). The hypothesis of a series of opposing but complementary avant-garde movements was for them a ‘dream palace’ and nothing but the application of the ‘the rules of classical dialectics’, where a series of seemingly opposed movements ultimately reach the synthesis of unity (1982: 210). Barbieri and Boekraad (1982) envisioned a form of critical architectural history that was a ‘tool for making current issues tangible’ (211). To this end, the historian had to focus not on a set of finished forms, but rather on the labor of the architect and on the act of design, as a ‘technique with cultural implications’. In their critique, Barbieri and Boekraad were influenced by Manfredo Tafuri’s Progetto e Utopia (1973), which had been translated into Dutch by Barbieri, Vollemans, Denissen, and Boekraad in 1978 (Figure 9).

Figure 9: Manfredo Tafuri, Ontwerp en utopie, architectuur en ontwikkeling van het kapitalisme [Design and utopia: Architecture and development of capitalism], 1978, cover page.

In 1980, Barbieri and Boekraad gave an example of the kind of history they envisioned. They published a reprint of the architect Johannes Bernardus van Loghem’s Bouwen/Bâtir/Building — Holland, which had originally been published in 1932 (1980) (Figure 10). In the introduction to this almost forgotten fragment of Dutch architectural history, Barbieri presented Van Loghem — a key figure in the Dutch Nieuwe Bouwen (New Way of Building, the Dutch name for the modern movement) — as an architect who in the 1930s saw the earlier avant-garde ideals of the 1920s finally becoming relevant amid capitalist crisis (Barbieri, introduction to Van Loghem 1980: 5). Yet rather than celebrating modern architecture’s triumph, Barbieri (1980) claimed that Van Loghem’s book questioned the role of the architect in a changing world (5). According to Barbieri, Van Loghem was convinced that the only way out of the crisis was to accept that the architect had a mere technical function as part of the industrial production process. Yet he still tried to salvage the ideological, form-producing function of architecture. In this way, so concluded Barbieri (1980), Van Loghem sailed between the Scylla and the Charybdis of Realpolitik and hope (7–10). According to Barbieri (1980) this struggle made him a modern intellectual who represented the bourgeois division between ‘Sein’ and ‘Sollen’ [being and ought] — between the acceptance of how things are and the longing for how it could be (16). Depicting the history of architecture as the division between ‘Sein’ and ‘Sollen’ — and thus as a history of ideology — meant a rupture with synthetic historiography. Instead of Fanelli’s panoramic vision, it meant a focus on the fragment as a deep drill into history and as a critical excavation of the underlying problematics at the core of modernity.

Figure 10: Johannes Bernardus van Loghem, Bouwen, Bauen, Bâtir, Building, 1980, cover page.

Conclusion: Historical Narratives and the Fragility of Facts

Fanelli was a pioneer in the scientific study of Dutch architecture history — including archival research, systematic collection of secondary sources, and analysis of the actual buildings in situ — in a time when it was not at all obvious to do so (Van Bergeijk 2010: 13–29). However, with the publication of Architettura moderna in Olanda, Fanelli did more than fill a gap. His book marked the start of a debate that foregrounded not only the task of the historian but also the very constitution of the object under investigation. Fanelli aimed to offer an objective representation of the past, seeking to create an accurate translation of the past into a factual, truthful representation. However, what becomes clear from the critique of Barbieri cum suis is that he was only expressing a certain interpretation of it that could be contested by others. This reflects a long-standing debate within the historical sciences concerning the epistemological status of facts. On one side, some scholars argue that historians ought to adhere strictly to facts, conceived as the objective, atomic units underpinning historical inquiry. On the other side, critics contend that facts are mediated through language. As the philosopher Arthur C. Danto has argued, facts are not neutral data but ‘events under a certain description’, articulated in terms that inevitably reflect the historian’s stance (Paul 2014: 85; Carr 1961: 3–27). In the context of this tension between fact and interpretation, the American historian Hayden White argued that, in addition to a first overt referent — the historical reality the historian seeks to describe — there exists a second, more implicit referent that is embedded in the narrative structure itself; it is this second referent against which meaning in terms of the first referent can first articulate itself (Ankersmit 1995: 83). Historical reality is, in other words, not only an external reality that serves as a touchstone but also a construct shaped by the conceptual frameworks through which we — consciously or unconsciously — codify and interpret the past.

It is from this point of view that we may understand how Fanelli and Barbieri regarded their task as historians and how they perceived the object of inquiry. For Fanelli, the historian’s task was to impose unity and coherence upon the architecture of the past through his narrative. One could argue that Fanelli transposed the unity of the modern movement onto the national level; while this unity was questioned on the level of an artistic movement, it was vital to understand the architecture of a nation. In this way, antagonistic movements — i.e., De Stijl and the Amsterdam School — turned out to be compatible after all. In contrast, Barbieri’s rupture with synthetic historiography originated in giving up faith in the unity of the past itself: this gave a new task to the historian, one that went from integration to dispersion, from coherence to fragment. Where Fanelli’s historical narrative centered on successful architects who actively shaped the identity of modern architecture in the Netherlands, Barbieri instead portrayed the architect as an almost tragic figure — one who, despite facing a changed society, persists in believing in the possibility of design. As a result, the object of inquiry shifts: from architecture as a product of triumphant authorship to architecture as a site of professional and existential struggle.

This leads to two conclusions of this essay. First, the historiography examined here is fundamentally intertextual in character and emerged primarily through its engagement with, and contrast to, alternative historical interpretations. Fanelli engaged in a critical dialogue with Zevi and Benevolo, and Barbieri in turn responded to Fanelli. The act of writing history thus inherently involves interpretation: it constitutes a proposal to view the past in a particular way and inevitably takes shape in dialogue with, or in opposition to, the interpretations advanced by other historians. Second, even in the writing of a so-called scientific history, historical reality is never entirely objective, nor is it wholly independent from the historian’s perspective: the subject not only reciprocates reality but also actively constitutes it. The resulting conceptual divergences should be understood as the precondition for a meaningful historical practice.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.